


tell me it won't always be this hard

by mapped



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Asexuality Spectrum, Campaign 01 Season 02: Fantasy High Sophomore Year (Dimension 20), Character Study, First Kiss, Getting Together, Introspection, M/M, Repression, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22946209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Riz has always been different, a goblin in a country where there aren't many goblins. He doesn't want to be any more different than he already is, but the truth isn't so easy.[Spoilers up to Sophomore Year e16 - My Green Heaven.]
Relationships: Riz Gukgak/Fabian Aramais Seacaster
Comments: 41
Kudos: 307





	tell me it won't always be this hard

**Author's Note:**

> Brennan Lee Mulligan: Here is beautiful backstory about Riz's immigrant family.  
> Me: Okay!! Time to project all my feelings about being a queer POC onto Riz Gukgak!! I see how it is!!
> 
> Title from Vienna Teng - 'Nothing Without You'.

Riz wonders, sometimes, what it would have been like to grow up in the Mountains of Chaos. He wonders if he would have been so aware of his own goblin body if he had been the norm rather than the exception, if all around him everyone else was also small and green-skinned, with too-sharp teeth. Would he see so much ugliness in the mirror, then? Would he run his tongue along his fangs and want to bite down on it, make himself bleed?

In middle school before Aguefort he’d been bullied too. It still feels like a miracle, now, not to be bullied. To walk into school and be unafraid. The fear lingers in his bloodstream though, just the faintest trace. He doesn’t know if he will ever learn to get rid of it completely. But in middle school it had been worse, much worse. Other people were growing so fast and looking at each other, always looking. So many pairs of eyes judging him to be different. Shuddering because they couldn’t bear the sight of him.

That was when he turned his own eyes towards clues and conspiracies, preferring to scrutinise objects rather than people. If he focused on searching for the answers to mysteries, he wouldn’t have the time to ask himself so many questions about his own body.

Home wasn’t much better either. Mom worked such long hours he was always alone. Alone with the long silences, wondering. And that hasn’t changed, really, but he’s gotten better at dealing with it. Or he’s gotten busier. Which: same thing.

He has friends now, at least. Adaine is deeply nerdy and has anxiety like him; Gorgug is possibly even more awkward than him and spends all of freshman year asking everyone if they’re his dad; Fig thought she was elvish for most of her life up until she grew horns; Kristen’s parents sound terrible and she’s still on her journey to becoming something outside of the mold they made for her. He isn’t the only one wondering about things.

And there’s Fabian, of course. Fabian. Riz doesn’t know what Fabian wonders about. Does Fabian wonder? Fabian with his shiny wealth and big house, his maid who brings him kippers, his mother who lounges about all day in a kimono, and his dad who offers drugs to all his friends.

Riz looks at Fabian and wonders.

* * *

As he builds his PI business, he gets clients who say that they don’t see him as a goblin, thinking that they’re being sweet when they say that. Such good people they are, looking past his hideous form; what matters to them is his keen mind, his ability to crack the case.

He wonders if his mom gets comments like that too. Probably all the time. But they don’t talk about it. He wonders if she ever wants to take sandpaper to her teeth, to file them down. If she ever wants to move to the Mountains of Chaos. Would she feel at home there? She’s only known Solace, all her life. But her parents had been born up in the Mountains and must have told her stories about them. 

Riz, on the other hand, knows nothing of the Mountains at all. Only what he’s read in books. When he dreams about the Mountains, that doesn’t count. The place in his dreams isn’t real. The place where everyone speaks goblin, and where everyone smiles without being nervous about showing their fangs.

Riz watches his mom with Gorthalax and feels happy for her. She works too hard; she deserves something good. It’s been nearly six years since his dad died, and she shouldn’t be so alone.

Riz watches Kristen with Tracker and he knows Kristen still has a lot to work through, but it seems to him like she got this one thing figured out real quick. And now she’s talking about sex constantly and it’s just a bit much. It’s a shock to see how confident and sure she’s become about her sexuality when she wakes up with a different take on her religion every day. He’s happy for her, too, but he could do without all the kinky details.

And there’s Gorgug with Zelda, and they’re kinda cute, and there’s Fig disguising herself to meet Dr. Asha at the hospital, which never stops being disturbing. And then there’s Fabian reminiscing about making out with Aelwyn at the party, insisting that he’ll break her out of prison so that he can hook up with her. Riz doesn’t quite know how he feels about that, but he does know that he can listen to Adaine rant about it when they’re studying together and nod along sympathetically.

“Why is everyone always so horny?” Adaine says, exasperated. “Don’t they have homework to do?”

And Riz agrees, and they swap flashcards and quiz each other.

But sometimes he relents when Fabian asks to copy his homework, and Fabian invites him over to his house where Cathilda has prepared a fancy three-course dinner for them, and they sit on the grass afterwards, clutching their stomachs full of steak and chocolate cake, and Fabian shares some past derring-do of his dead papa, and Riz stays quiet and looks up at the night sky and remembers his own dead father.

And when he looks across at Fabian with his brown skin and silver hair and dark eyepatch, he wonders.

* * *

It occurs to him at some point that the question he is asking is as much _Will anyone ever see_ me _that way?_ as it is _Will_ I _ever see anyone that way?_

When he makes up Baron from the Baronies, his penpal girlfriend, he thinks about what it would be like to love someone he only knows through words; someone who only knows him through words. Someone who can’t see him, and who can’t therefore ever claim that they can see past what he looks like.

To not see him as a goblin is to not see him at all. But to see him simply as a goblin is not to see him either.

When he sees Baron in the mirror, the grotesque manifestation of all his lies, he thinks: _Is this how ugly I am?_

Evil, nasty, hideous. All the things a goblin is.

Later, on the Leviathan, he watches Fabian fail and fall and lose all sense of himself. Scarred, broken, feverish, stumbling. Here is Fabian, wondering who he is. Not being able to live up to the specter of Bill Seacaster. There is so much he thinks he has to be, and he’s just a stupid boy.

And Riz is a goblin boy in Elmville with his goblin single mom, and there is so much he has to be, too. He has to be so good, to not be what other people think goblins are. He has to be more than a goblin—but he is only a goblin, living in a tiny apartment with his mom, where the fridge is barely ever stocked.

Later still, in Fallinel, he watches Fabian get back on his feet, and more than that, become so light on his feet that Riz almost understands all this elvish nonsense about drifting flowers on the wind. Fabian in the place where his mother grew up, where his grandfather welcomes him with open arms and glittering tears. He learns to dance the way elves here dance, his body moving with such grace as if it’s always known how, as if he was born to do this, and Riz’s heart glows and cracks all at once.

He wonders what he has lost, growing up in Solace. What the goblins in the Mountains of Chaos know that he does not. Whether there are ancestral memories sleeping beneath his muscle and sinew, never to be awakened.

Fabian is so beautiful, dancing with his grandfather, flourishing in the knowledge that this is where a part of him comes from, and it hurts Riz to look at him. The softness in him that Riz has seen before in rare quiet moments, now fully on display. It seems impossible that Fabian could make Riz think of a handful of blown petals, but impossible things do happen.

“This has been amazing,” Fabian says to Riz, in a moment of calm, sprawling on the ground. “I didn’t realize how much it would mean to me to connect with this part of my heritage.”

“That’s great, dude, it really is,” Riz says. “It’s cool to see how you’ve taken to it so easily. It looks like it’s helped you a lot.”

“You know my father. He cut an imposing figure. He was the pinnacle of masculinity. I always felt like I had to be that, too. Felt like I had to be strong and violent and intimidating all the time, because that’s the only way to prove myself as a man. But it’s freeing, to let myself be the person I truly am.”

Riz wonders what that must be like. Where his true self is, and what it would take for him to get there. “Yeah, you can be strong _and_ you can dance. That’s cool.”

“Have you ever considered going to the place where your family is originally from?” Fabian asks, startling Riz. Fabian doesn’t know how to detect thoughts, he reminds himself.

“I guess it’s crossed my mind before. It’d be weird though. My mom was born in Solace, so it’s not like I have any living connection to the Mountains of Chaos.”

“ _This_ place is weird. I definitely do not fit in here. My grandfather keeps reiterating how human I am as though it’s something truly awful. But it’s good to get in touch with the elven side of myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever understood what being half-elf means. My mother, wonderful woman that she is, wasn’t terribly present before Papa died.”

“Right, yeah. I don’t know if I’d fit in with other goblins in the Mountains, either.”

“We could take a trip together. If you wanted. I would go with you. Or, you know, the Bad Kids, all together, summer vacation in the Mountains. So even if it sucks, we’ll all be there with you.”

Every time Riz has thought about it before, about going to the Mountains, he’s been too afraid. He knows he’s different. He’s always known he’s different. Of course, part of that is just growing up in Solace as a goblin, but it’s not just that. It makes him sweaty, thinking about it. About not fitting in anywhere, because he’s just too strange. Too jumpy and intense, the tangle of his own thoughts a puzzle too complex for him to solve. 

But going with Fabian—or with the Bad Kids—could be good. Better, anyway.

“Yeah, that’s a thought. I appreciate it.”

Fabian gives him a fistbump and he’s struck by how much he just wants this. He just wants always to be Fabian’s friend. He wonders if Fabian’s ever felt the same thing, so strongly.

* * *

He is in heaven talking to his dad about sex and he is sweating buckets. His mom’s always been too busy to do this, for which he is eternally grateful, but now he’s in _heaven_ and he’s so glad to see his dad again, if not for the fact that he’s being subjected to the most uncomfortable topic of conversation in the world.

He tells his dad that it’s not happening. He doesn’t want to have sex. This is true, but he thinks about Fabian when he says it. Fabian’s ridiculous way of speaking, Fabian’s deep affection for the Hangman, Fabian’s sheet fluttering as he danced under a starlit sky.

His dad tells him that it’s all okay. Okay if he never wants to have sex; okay if he does, eventually. He wonders, even as it horrifies him, about the people his dad has slept with. Objectively, Pok Gukgak is a handsome man, even if he does look pretty dorky in the high school photo that he shows Riz. Can it be a fact that goblins are ugly, even though his dad isn’t, and neither is his mom?

Growing up, his dad wouldn’t have had this talk with Riz’s grandfather. Riz imagines that apartment in Bastion City, the silences in it.

What Riz’s dad is doing—saying _I love you_ and insisting on using words clearly to make sure that Riz understands that he would be accepted and loved no matter what—is far beyond what Riz’s dad could have hoped for from his own father. So Riz, despite his damp forehead and damp palms, feels like he’s able to grasp how significant this is.

His dad is proud of him, and he goes back to the prime material plane knowing this with a pure, bright certainty.

His friends are all relieved to see him, and they tell him that Fabian started this trend of calling him their little angel. He eyes Fabian and Fabian shrugs, half-embarrassed.

At the shrimp party, Riz finds himself a little bit delirious from the exhilaration of everything that’s happened today, and also the fear of what’s coming tomorrow. Infected by the chaotic atmosphere at the party, he takes a moment to ask Fig, after she gets off the call with her manager, “You think my dad is good-looking, right?”

“Uh, _yeah_! He’s a hot spy!” She adds more solemnly, “I mean, from now on, I am not going to go for middle-aged men anymore, but I can still say I think he’s hot.”

“Right.” Riz still can’t believe he was the last to know about Fig and Ayda, but he’s happy for them. Ayda is definitely a much better choice than any middle-aged man. “So do you think I’m ever going to be as good-looking as he is?”

“Aw, Riz, you _are_ hot! Not that I’m personally attracted to you, but you are actually hot. Like maybe the clothes you wear are a little weird but some people are into that, I’m sure! Fabian, back me up on this.”

“What?” Fabian says, as Fig grabs him while he stalks past sideways in a crab stance.

Riz groans, putting his head in his hands. Too late. Fig asks Fabian, “You think Riz is hot, right?”

“Me?” Fabian splutters. “I mean, Riz, you are—obviously you are. A fine-looking fellow!”

“A fine-looking fellow?” Riz repeats. Fig has already escaped.

“Mm-hmm.” Fabian shifts from foot to foot, avoiding Riz’s eyes. “Indeed.”

Riz thinks about what it would mean to be wanted. To be wanted, for him, would open up the possibility of wanting. All his life he has been different from those around him. He couldn’t let himself be even more different than he already is, even if he knows that he’s only lying to himself. The difference is there, stitched into his being, whether he is willing to admit it or not.

“I think you’re a fine-looking fellow too,” Riz says, acutely aware of how warm he’s getting; the heat rising up his neck. His rubs his hands against the fabric of his trousers to dry them.

“You do?” Fabian asks, so much hope in his voice it’s like a bullet through Riz’s heart, fizzing with magical energy.

Riz thinks about how his dad must have had to learn to say _I love you_ , when it was something he never really heard from his own father. Words are hard, but they are worth the effort, so Riz tries. “Yeah. My dad would _not_ stop talking to me about sex and it was—oh god—it was really, really bad, and I told him that I don’t want to have sex, I don’t understand why all my friends are so horny all the time, but, uh, wow, this is—weird, but even though I don’t want to have sex, when I think about sex I think about—you. To be clear, I don’t think about having sex with you, but you’re just the first thing that jumps to mind anyway. So. Yeah. That’s what’s up. I think I like you, I like you a lot, but I just don’t really know what that means or what I want you to do about it or anything, which isn’t very helpful, sorry.”

Words really are hard.

Fabian has been staring intently the whole time, and now he’s gripping Riz’s shoulders firmly. “You like me?”

“Yeah.” Riz knows this much, that his feelings for Fabian hover and hum golden somewhere inside his chest, different from the way he feels about anyone else. He yearns for long days with Fabian doing nothing, just talking and sitting side by side.

“ _Oh_ , the Ball! I’m overcome.” Fabian puts one hand over his heart. “I like you too. It’s funny—maybe only a few weeks ago I couldn’t let myself think about this. I mean I kind of knew, but it also freaked me out. But then after Leviathan it felt like I was starting over again and I had to really think about the person I want to be, and that includes this. I dance now, and I like boys now, and I like you in particular. We can start with that and work out the rest. What do you say?” His fingers, soft as elven silk, brush against Riz’s cheek. “We’ll have the best detective in all of Spyre on the case.”

“Yeah, all right,” Riz whispers, his heart racing even more than usual, amazed at all the wondering and growing Fabian has been doing; at this gentle, careful boy who stands before him, showing him all the impossible things that are actually wholly possible.

Fabian smiles, and Riz can’t help but smile back, wide and careless, fangs visible. They dart away to a secluded corner in the house, away from their nosy friends, and Fabian bends to rest his forehead against Riz’s. Even though Riz knows that his forehead is terribly sweaty, Fabian doesn’t seem to mind. Riz is the one who tilts his mouth up for a kiss, and when their lips meet, it’s soft and weird and interesting. All Riz knows is that he wants to pull Fabian as close to him as possible, but they could be kissing, or they could be eating shrimp, or they could be doing something else. It doesn’t matter what, as long as they can be together, touching.

Riz tries to look down the path ahead, wondering if he can see where it leads. And then he decides to stop wondering, and just look at Fabian. Just look.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm demisexual (and bi), and though I wrote this with my own experience of demisexuality in mind, I've left it kind of ambiguous in this fic as to where Riz sits on the ace spectrum, and I'm happy for my readers to interpret him however you want! I'm here for all kinds of ace!Riz, anyway.
> 
> Comments are much appreciated! I'm [reluming](http://reluming.tumblr.com/) on tumblr; come say hi!


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